A Democratic Socialist Blog

End of 40 Hours and Pauperization

The 40 hour work week has come to an end. So, where are the meaningful jobs? The Jobs with justice? Is all there is left are jobs as waiters and store clerks? Not that these are bad professions. today some people need three jobs to get by. Pay is so low that people are barely holding their heads above water. Even today’s executives admit that in the future people who have jobs will be the rare exception. Rather than create good jobs, there is a shedding of labor due to De-Industrialization. Industrial jobs supported towns and cities. People in one Coal town made $500 a week Union wages. these workers spread the wealth in town establishments. The Company automated the Coal mine, 90% of jobs where lost and the own went into economic collapse. This is a pauperization process.
Literally, to make a pauper of, or impoverish. Marx used the term to describe the process by which the working class grows increasingly impoverished in relation to the capital. The Jobs disappear and there is no social safety net.
Jeremy Rifkin states: A technology revolution is fast replacing human beings with machines in virtually every sector and industry in the global economy. Already, millions of workers have been permanently eliminated from the economic process, and whole work categories and job assignments have shrunk, been restructured, or disappeared. Global unemployment has now reached its highest level since the great depression of the 1930s. More than 800 million human beings are now unemployed or underemployed in the world. That figure is likely to rise sharply between now and the turn of the century as millions of new entrants into the workforce find themselves without jobs.
Factory owners today have said, “The more we use automation, the less we depend on humans, as you see, in our factory, we use less people than ever before.”
On a TV show called Mega Technologies the program showed robots moving packages faster than humans can, if the robot breaks down, it takes eight minutes for one robot to repair another robot.
“Tools for Creativity, Ivan Illich calls for” The Right to Useful Unemployment: a positive, constructive, and even optimistic concept dealing with that activity by which people are useful to themselves and others outside the production of commodities for the market. Unfettered by managing professionals, unmeasured and immeasurable by economists, these activities truly generate satisfaction, creativity, and freedom.
But the Governments of the world choose to drive people into poverty. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums. Our world is radically unequal and explosively unstable unequal undemocratic world. From the sprawling trash piles of El Salvadorea to the garbage hills of Dharavi urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, or opportunity. the horrible destruction, the filth and pollution, the poverty, misery and want, the disease, crime, in short the impoverishment of the worldwide poor that is the inevitable and class war of the capitalist mode of production. Within three decades, a stunning two billion people will live in the slums of rural areas and cities in the Third World, where all public services are absent, there are no toilets or drinking water, and where even the poor exploit the poor.
In America no one cares about Labor. in the 70″ 33% of homes where Union families. now there only about maybe 5%. people care more about $200 pare of sneakers than each other. Fellow man is a benign concept.
the global urban population surpassed the global rural population. It has been estimated that both populations stand at about 3.2 billion.
Beginning with Reagan,this dystopian urbanization occurring on a grand scale The blame squarely on the neo-liberal policies of the IMF. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, the IMF imposed its Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). It was a one-size-fits-all program for debt burdened Third World countries to open up their economies and theoretically participate in global economy. The program (SAP) called for the deregulation of agriculture and the downsizing of the public sector.
the Social Democrats and Socialists have failed because the system is out of control and now belongs to International “Banksters”. It is no longer Capitalism as a Pseudo Capitalist system. Most of the important ideas concerning the rise of a managerial class with loyalties more to its own class than to the owners of the enterprise (traditional Capitalists) Now own the world. “The managers, the ruling class of the new society, will for their own purposes require at least a limited democracy. If not elimination of Democracy.